Rod Dreher's Blog, page 649

Pamela Druckerman, an American Francophile, moved to Paris twelve years ago. She idealized France, as many of us do (c’est moi!). But now she’s sad, as she tells readers of her NYT column:

I see now that France was never paradise. “Your alter country is all that your first was not,” writes the English author Julian Barnes, “commitment to it involves idealism, love, sentimentality and a certain selective vision.”

But France has also gotten worse. What once seemed like adorable grouchiness or “bleak chic” has morphed into something darker: a willingness to believe that people are walking here from Aleppo for free root canals; a sense that — despite being the world’s sixth-largest economy — France is powerless to help more.

At this point, the French even seem unhappy about how negative they’ve become. A positive approach to refugees would probably energize them. As it stands, France can no longer claim to have a universal message. These days, it’s just a flawed, ordinary country that mostly thinks for itself.

If you read the whole column, you’ll see that what disillusioned her is the fact that France does not want to open its door to these refugees. Is it really the case that she cannot see why a French person would not want to throw the doors of their country open to Muslims from the Third World? Did Charlie Hebdo not happen?

A French friend listening to me go on about how much I loved Paris told me that I should not forget that having rented an apartment in the 5th Arrondissement (the Left Bank), I was living in the Disneyland version of Paris. There I was surrounded by the culture, the civility, and everything people like me think of when we indulge in our romance with France. Adam Gopnik has written:

We are happy, above all, when we are absorbed, and we are absorbed when we are serious, and the secret of Paris, in the end, is that the idea of happiness it presents is always mingled, I do not always know how, with a feeling of seriousness.

That sense of serious happiness, of pleasure allied to education … this tincture of seriousness infiltrates our happiness, giving it dignity. In Paris, Americans achieve absorption without obvious accomplishment, a lovely and un-American emotion.

This is true, and glorious. It’s what makes Paris Paris, and what makes France France, at least in the eyes of Americans like me. But we should keep in mind a couple of things. First, France is no more paradise than any other country is paradise. Second, all the things we love about France didn’t just happen, and they aren’t going to be there forever without care and stewardship. It may be the case that France ought to take more refugees in. But I don’t understand why so many left-wing intellectuals have this idea that the liberalism that means so much to them is strong enough to withstand the presence of an alien people whose religious and cultural convictions are strongly illiberal.

My sense is that people like Pamela Druckerman delight in the experience of the fruits of French civilization without having to dirty their hands with the unpleasant things one has to do to cultivate the conditions that make those fruits possible. She should move to the banlieues and see how that affects her opinion about the failures of the French to be universalist humanitarians.

Which of these two videos do you find more disturbing? The first one was taken recently at the Chicago Vocational Career Academy. Look:

The second one, which you have no doubt seen because it has received national media attention:

The sheriff’s deputy, Ben Fields, was later fired. From the NYT:

The deputy’s dismissal came after department officials conducted an internal review that, according to the sheriff, found that Deputy Fields had used a maneuver that violated the agency’s training and procedural standards. But Sheriff Lott also criticized the student, a sophomore, in harsh tones for “having started this whole incident with her actions.”

Deputy Fields, who could not be reached for comment, was called to an Algebra 1 class on Monday morning after, according to witnesses and law enforcement officials, the student refused her teacher’s requests to stop using her cellphone. After the student refused to leave the classroom, Deputy Fields forced her from her desk by flipping it before he pulled and threw her toward the front of the room.

Now the out-of-control Obama administration is conducting a civil rights investigation into the deputy’s actions, which could result in federal charges lodged against him. According to the sheriff who fired him, Fields has been in a long-term relationship with an African-American woman. Some kind of racist he is.

Two black TV personalities, Raven-Symoné and CNN’s Don Lemon, for criticizing the teenage girl. If my smart-aleck daughter had behaved that way in a classroom, and refused a deputy’s orders to get up and leave, I would buy him dinner for treating her that way.

Which of these two videos represents the greater threat to society, the behavior of the Chicago students, or the behavior of the South Carolina cop?

Even if one concedes that the cop overreacted, there’s no question in my mind which one is by far the worst. God help that poor Chicago teacher, Ms. Cox. You would have to be crazy to want to teach (“teach”) in a school (“school”) like that.

We can’t deny that the racist use of power by authority exists, and is a problem. When authority — the authority of law enforcement, of educational institutions, of religious institutions, and so forth — is abused by those who hold power, then they must be held accountable. The worse problem, though, as we see in the Chicago video (the fear in the eyes of the teacher is both heartbreaking and infuriating) is a total lack of respect for authority. Any authority.

UPDATE: A reader responds to this post in an e-mail, which I’ve ever so slightly altered with asterisks:

I hope your children are taken away from you very soon and placed with someone who does not condone assaulting them.

Christ, you’re an a**hole.

Dan Adams

Systems Administrator

Hawley, LLC

Thank you, Dan Adams, for showing your hand. I am pleased to know that you would have the state seize my children over my having expressed hypothetical sympathy for the cop. Left-wing tyrant that you and your ilk are.

UPDATE.2: Dan Adams writes back:

Left-Wing Tyrant checking in here. I am at a complete loss how you can claim to follow “The Prince of Peace” and yet condone this vicious, unprovoked *assault* on an orphaned black teenager.

The fact that you laughingly consider rewarding someone for throwing your own children to the ground in that manner is incredibly disturbing and frankly, unhinged. I stand by what I said and I advise you seek professional help before you ever do that to those who call you “Father”. How would your wife feel if she read this post?

And yes, if parents will not protect their own children from physical harm, the State should.

As an aside, people like you who claim Christ but condone child abuse are why I lost my faith.

And people like you are why even though I have big problems with organized conservatism, I have no faith at all in liberalism.

The new normal:

Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.

Education officials said the decision was the first of its kind on the rights of transgender students, which are emerging as a new cultural battleground in public schools across the country. In previous cases, federal officials had been able to reach settlements giving access to transgender students in similar situations. But in this instance, the school district in Palatine, Ill., has not yet come to an agreement, prompting the federal government to threaten sanctions. The district, northwest of Chicago, has indicated a willingness to fight for its policy in court.

More:

In a letter sent Monday, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education told the Palatine district that requiring a transgender student to use private changing and showering facilities was a violation of that student’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that bans sex discrimination. The student, who identifies as female but was born male, should be given unfettered access to girls’ facilities, the letter said.

“All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities — this is a basic civil right,” Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room.”

The “female” in question has a penis. More:

Officials in the Palatine district, which serves more than 12,000 students, have framed their position as a middle ground. The transgender student in question plays on a girls’ sports team, is called “she” by school staff and is referred to by a female name. But the district, citing privacy concerns, had required her to change clothes and shower separately.

The district said she was allowed to change inside the girls’ locker room, but only behind a curtain. The student, who has not been publicly identified, has said she would probably use that curtain to change. But she and the federal government have insisted that she be allowed to make that decision voluntarily, and not because of requirements by the district.

“What our client wants is not hard to understand: She wants to be accepted for who she is and to be treated with dignity and respect — like any other student,” said John Knight, the director of the L.G.B.T. and H.I.V. Project of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, who is representing the student. “The district’s insistence on separating my client from other students is blatant discrimination. Rather than approaching this issue with sensitivity and dignity, the district has attempted to justify its conduct by challenging my client’s identity as a girl.”

Because your client has a penis! Read the whole thing, and understand that the US Government is now committed to using its power to force open the doors to public school locker rooms for people of the opposite sex. There is no such thing as compromise, according to the Obama administration. Separation is inherently unequal, it says.

This is radical. Yet this is a priority to the elites of the Democratic Party — and all public schools are subject to their radicalism. The federal government believes that gender is whatever an individual claims it is, and that all society must accept that claim. Ten years ago, if you had said that the federal government was soon going to force public schools to let biological males undress in girls’ locker room, and biological females undress in locker rooms filled with teenage boys, you would have been called some sort of right-wing paranoid.

And now, this.

The thing is, most people with kids in public schools cannot afford to take them out to homeschool or put them in private school. They are all at the mercy of the federal government. People who can afford to do otherwise will increasingly feel compelled to. Good job, Democrats.

I was talking not long ago with the head of a private Christian high school. He told me that he was receiving advice from some on the institution’s board that the school needed to adopt a firm policy keeping out students who have gay parents. That seemed to him really uncharitable, and denied the school a chance to minister to such kids and to their families. I told the principal that I agreed with him, but that the militancy of LGBT activists and the federal government was pushing Christian schools like his to take harder lines than they want to do. Lawyers have told me that if Christian institutions do not establish firm, clear doctrinal lines, and enforce them, they are going to be in a very weak position if someone takes them to court. Which someone will, eventually. It’s a form of Zero Tolerance that the left is forcing on Christian institutions that want to maintain a Christian identity, as they understand it.

Bad news for Sen. David Vitter, the GOP candidate for Louisiana governor:

Democrat John Bel Edwards has a 20% lead over Senator David Vitter in the Louisiana Gubernatorial runoff, according to a survey released today by WVLA and JMC Analytics.

The brand new, statewide poll results confirm something that hasn’t happened in 7 years: A Democratic Governor could take office in Louisiana.

Today, WVLA released a survey of 600 likely voters, conducted by JMC analytics. When asked who they’d vote for if the election were held today, 52% of people chose State Representative John Bel Edwards. 32% chose Senator David Vitter, and 16% were undecided.

These numbers are surprising because they show that Edwards, a Democrat, will pick up more votes from former Republican candidates Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne than Vitter, a fellow Republican.

Doesn’t surprise me. So many of the Edwards voters are Anybody But Vitter people. Edwards, a pro-life, pro-gun, retired Army Ranger who has served for some time in the Louisiana legislature, is a plausible conservative Democrat. The state sheriffs have endorsed Edwards, and have dismissed a Vitter ad saying that Edwards is going to release hordes of inmates onto the streets of Louisiana.

The Baton Rouge Advocate has an analysis showing that Edwards, a conservative Democrat, and Vitter agree on far more than they disagree.

I predict that Vitter will release an ad of some sort attempting to force Edwards to take a position on efforts by Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle, and to rename it. This has nothing to do with running the state, but Vitter knows that this is a potential emotional flashpoint with many Louisiana voters, both white and black. The kind of voters, both black and white, who approve of Landrieu’s actions aren’t going to vote Vitter anyway, and compelling Edwards to take a stand one way or the other may suppress Edwards’s vote — unless the Edwards campaign can successfully rebut the claim. Watch. It’s a long way from now till the November 21 runoff vote.

Mind you, if voters in the October 24 open primary had chosen either Angelle or Dardenne (who together got more far more votes than Vitter), there wouldn’t be much of a contest now; Louisiana would be well on its way to another Republican governor. Angelle and Dardenne split the anti-Vitter Republican vote, though.

Slate‘s resident gay hysteric Mark Joseph Stern, who could find the homo-hate in a box of Raisinets, is glad the Mets lost the world series, because, yep, Ha-a-a-a-a-te!. The Mets’ Daniel Murphy is a Christian who does not morally approve of homosexuality, and once said so in a fairly modest, irenic way, quoted here by Stern:

I disagree with his lifestyle. I do disagree with the fact that Billy is a homosexual. That doesn’t mean I can’t still invest in him and get to know him. I don’t think the fact that someone is a homosexual should completely shut the door on investing in them in a relational aspect. Getting to know him. That, I would say, you can still accept them but I do disagree with the lifestyle, 100 percent.

… Maybe, as a Christian, that we haven’t been as articulate enough in describing what our actual stance is on homosexuality. We love the people. We disagree the lifestyle. That’s the way I would describe it for me. It’s the same way that there are aspects of my life that I’m trying to surrender to Christ in my own life. There’s a great deal of many things, like my pride.

Plainly, the Mets home run king is Babe Hitler.

Seriously, though, here is a Christian who has a moral objection to homosexuality, but who says nobody, least of all himself, is perfect, and he is willing to reach out and befriend gays. That’s not good enough for Stern, who demands that Murphy be punished. Why? Because he’s a killer. Stern remarks:

Every year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of gay and bisexual kids kill themselves precisely because they are pummeled with homophobic ideas like these. Some overdose on their parents’ pills; some slit their wrists; some hang themselves or put bullets in their brain. LGB kids are between two and four times more likely to try to kill themselves than straight kids. Every episode of LGB victimization, including verbal harassment, increases the likelihood of self-harm 2.5 times on average, according to the CDC.

When gay kids read comments like Murphy’s—and then see that the MLB deemed them acceptable—they’re liable to conclude that they really are twisted and aberrant, that society really won’t accept them for who they are. These toxic feelings could only be exacerbated by a cult of Murphy, a growing fan base that lauds him as the Mets’ savior. To see an anti-gay player be not just tolerated, but celebrated—even by those who would otherwise rebuke his prejudice—would be profoundly dispiriting. Even I, a fairly thick-skinned gay adult, was stunned by the celerity with which otherwise tolerant baseball fans forgave his anti-gay disparagements once he started hammering homers.

Mark Joseph Stern is “fairly thick skinned” like Saran Wrap is the walls of the Kremlin. He goes on to say that he’s glad the Mets lost, to punish this thought criminal, and Stern hopes for Murphy’s career to implode:

But I’m delighted to see Murphy’s star come crashing down so publicly. Now a free agent, Murphy’s stock just plummeted, and his name will be whispered in disappointment rather than trumpeted with glee. Murphy’s horrifying performance, his downfall on the field, likely had nothing to do with his noxious personal prejudice. And yet, in some small way, it felt like justice.

Because justice. That’s how Social Justice Warriors roll.

See, this is why I keep telling Millennial Evangelicals that all the winsomeness in the world won’t make them love you. There is no way in the eyes of many LGBT folks and their allies to hold dissenting views in good faith. You may believe that it is wrong to reduce gay people to their sexual desires, and thus to dehumanize them, but many of them believe it is “justice” to reduce orthodox Christians and other moral traditionalists to their beliefs about homosexuality, and to judge them accordingly.

Thus do we pathologize dissent, on the road to criminalizing it. The reader who sent this item in writes:

So. To tolerate the traditional view of homosexuality, which prevailed until two minutes ago, is a violent offense. You cannot just sit there and listen to it. You MUST “reprimand” him. Not doing so is to render his violent claims reasonable and harmless. While we all know that they are unreasonable and harmful.

What if a Christian wrote that he was glad to see a sports team lose a national championship because the team includes an openly gay star athlete, and we cannot have people cheering for a homosexual? Would we not think that person was a petulant narcissist, and quite possibly a crackpot bigot? Could that person even hope to get a column like that published in a respectable publication?

Of course not. But there is Mark Joseph Stern, in Slate, where I bet there’s not a single person in the newsroom who has the slightest idea how unbelievably offensive that opinion is, and how nasty and repellent it would be if things were flipped, and a Christian said it about a homosexual sports figure.

I don’t know whether I find it more troubling to contemplate the backlash to this aggression, or to contemplate the likelihood that there will be no backlash, but that society will come to agree that Christians like Daniel Murphy are thought criminals who do not deserve to have careers in athletics.

UPDATE: 

Q for @roddreher: if a player said he disagreed with the “Christian lifestyle,” would you say that’s totally OK? https://t.co/WmWsXeQbYc

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) November 2, 2015

@mjs_DC Of course. Who cares?

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) November 3, 2015

I don’t even care if a ballplayer says he doesn’t care for Christians. I might think, “What a jerk,” but the more important question is, “Can he hit?” People are more than the sum of their opinions. If his opinion was, “Hitler and Stalin were a couple of swell guys,” well, okay, that’s a big problem. But this is not that, and neither, by a thousand million miles, is what Daniel Murphy said.

The New York Times reports:

There are more displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history — 60 million in all — and they are on the march in numbers not seen since World War II. They are coming not just from Syria, but from an array of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Haiti, as well as any of a dozen or so nations in sub-Saharan and North Africa. They are unofficial ambassadors of failed states, unending wars, intractable conflicts.

The most striking thing about the current migration crisis, however, is how much bigger it could still get.

More:

“Throughout Europe, xenophobia and open racism are running rampant, and nationalist, even far-right parties are gaining ground,” Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, wrote recently in an article that appeared on Project Syndicate, an online news service.

“At the same time, this is only the beginning of the crisis, because the conditions inciting people to flee their homelands will only worsen. And the E.U., many of whose members have the world’s largest and best-equipped welfare systems, appears to be overwhelmed by it — politically, morally and administratively.”

Those stresses pose a challenge for the future, experts say, because the flow is unlikely to ebb anytime soon.

“I don’t think this wave can stop,” said Sonja Licht of the International Center for Democratic Transition. “It can maybe from time to time be somewhat less intensive, we simply have to prepare. The global north must be prepared that the global south is on the move, the entire global south. This is not just a problem for Europe but for the whole world.”

The German village of Sumte (pop. 102) has been told it has to receive 750 asylum seekers. This will, of course, obliterate the village for all intents and purposes. But who cares about them, right?

Via Steve Sailer, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban slams George Soros on the migration crisis:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused billionaire investor George Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying to undermine European nations by supporting refugees heading to the continent from the Middle East and beyond.

“His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle,” Orban said in an interview on public radio Kossuth. “These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.”

Soros responded:

Soros said in an e-mailed statement that a six-point plan published by his foundation helps “uphold European values” while Orban’s actions “undermine those values.”

“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” he said in the statement. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”

Remarks Sailer:

In other words, Soros is agreeing with Orban.

Interesting times.

HuffPo has a six-minute clip of an incredibly powerful Chris Christie talk on the campaign trail, in which he challenged the way we deal with drug abuse in this country. It’s one of the most compelling things I’ve ever heard any politician say. He starts by talking about how his mother, a smoker so addicted to nicotine that she couldn’t quit, contracted lung cancer in her 70s. Christie says nobody said, “Well, she deserved it, let’s not give her chemotherapy.” So why do so many people object to giving treatment to drug and alcohol addicts? he asks. He ties his support for drug treatment to being pro-life. And then he tells the story about a law school classmate who, as a practicing lawyer, had to take Percocet for an injury. He became addicted, and … well, watch the video. You won’t be able to take your eyes off of it.

If the next president is a Republican, I hope he or she finds something important for Chris Christie to do in the administration. I swear, I would rather do almost anything than watch a politician talk for six minutes, but this is riveting stuff.

Well, well, well, look what the garrulous Pope Francis has told his Italian editor friend Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica:

“It is true — Pope Francis answered — it is a truth and for that matter the family that is the basis of any society changes continuously, as all things change around us. We must not think that the family does not exist any longer, it will always exist, because ours is a social species, and the family is the support beam of sociability, but it cannot be avoided that the current family, open as you say, contains some positive aspects, and some negative ones. … The diverse opinion of the bishops is part of this modernity of the Church and of the diverse societies in which she operated, but the goal is the same, and for that which regards the admission of the divorced to the Sacraments, [it] confirms that this principle has been accepted by the Synod. This is bottom line result, the de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask will be admitted.” [Rorate Caeli translation, emphasis added]

So the Synod did not give Francis the result he wanted, so he’s going to push for what he wants anyway (and don’t forget, he has the power to overrule the Synod). The Trads and the conservatives were right all along.

At this point, you can’t be shocked by this. What I find more shocking is that the Pope knows full well that many, even most, of his bishops are against what he proposes, believing it to be heresy. And he telephones a newspaper editor (an atheist newspaper editor at that!) to undercut his own Synod. Loose cannons are less dangerous than this pontiff.

You see this, from one of the lead Douthat detractors?

Don't read @DouthatNYT latest provocation. It is just part of indep study course in ecclesiology/Church history a few of us are giving him

— Massimo Faggioli (@MassimoFaggioli) October 31, 2015

I’m posting this from the Houston airport, en route to home. I ran across this passage in The Brothers Karamazov, and thought of the liberal Catholic theologians who denounced Douthat, and who are scandalized by the resistance they have called forth. The speaker here is Dmitri Karamazov:

And Rakitin doesn’t like God, oof, how he doesn’t! That’s the sore spot in all of them! But they conceal it. They lie. They pretend. That’s the sort spot in all of them! ‘What, are you going to push for that in the department of criticism?’ I asked. ‘Well, they won’t let me do it openly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. And he laughed. ‘Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,’ he said.

UPDATE: And so now, the Vatican is walking this back. Excerpt:

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told the Register Nov. 2: “As has already occurred in the past, Scalfari refers in quotes what the Pope supposedly told him, but many times it does not correspond to reality, since he does not record nor transcribe the exact words of the Pope, as he himself has said many times. So it is clear that what is being reported by him in the latest article about the divorced and remarried is in no way reliable and cannot be considered as the Pope’s thinking.”

Father Lombardi said he would not be issuing a statement about the matter as those who have “followed the preceding events and work in Italy know the way Scalfari writes and knows these things well.” Over the past two years, Scalfari has written several such articles following conversations with Pope Francis, each of which has drawn controversy.

This exchange appears no different, which raises the question: why does the Pope continue to speak to someone such as Scalfari, and discuss such sensitive subjects with him, when he knows he is unreliable but likely to report his words without reference to a recording or transcript?

Exactly. On the face of it, it would appear that Pope Francis is an idiot to keep calling and talking to this guy who keeps misquoting him. I don’t believe for a second that Pope Francis is an idiot. This strategy allows him to signal to liberals what he intends to do, while preserving himself plausible deniability (“That socialist geezer doesn’t even write anything down! How can you believe a thing he says?”) to Catholics inclined to give the pope the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe you heard about the shootings in Colorado Springs today. Four dead, including the shooter. They happened not too far from my hotel this morning. I didn’t hear about them till later this afternoon, after the Benedict Option event. The man who told me about them had been at my talk. His name is David Works. He went on to say that he appreciated what I had to say in my talk about how the church in America has no real idea how to deal with suffering, or how to talk about it, and how we need to do a much better job of it.

“You talked about the martyrs,” he said. “My two teenage daughters were martyrs.”

“What?” I said.

David Works is the man in this story from 2007:

Even though the Colorado shooter may have killed their two daughters, devout Christians David and Marie Works said Thursday morning their faith has helped them to forgive the gunman and find peace in knowing that Stephanie and Rachel Works are in heaven.

Appearing in an exclusive interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” David Works said the family was leaving New Life Church in Colorado Springs for burgers and shakes when he heard a “pop” and saw the gunman, Matthew Murray, making his way to the parking lot armed with an assault rifle.

“I screamed at everybody to get down, that there’s a shooter out there,” recalled the teenage sisters’ father.

Upon seeing his 16-year-old daughter Rachel fall to the pavement, Works said he tried to rush to her side but was stopped short by the gunman.

“I saw him again point the gun and, uh felt my belly rip, and fell to the pavement, not having gotten to Rachel all the way,” described Works in recounting the horror of their Dec. 14 encounter.

His wife, Marie, meanwhile, was trying to help the couple’s 18-year-old daughter Stephanie.

“I saw lots of blood coming out of her nose,” said Marie. “And I thought, she’s been hit in the head, that – and then I started to look for a pulse and I couldn’t find a pulse. And I was fairly sure that she was gone.”

He showed me a scar on his abdomen from where he took a bullet that day. The gunman, Matthew Murray, hated Christians:

“You christians brought this on yourselves,” Murray writes in his 452-word harangue. “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill.

“Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”

After hearing his story, I asked David Works how on earth he found the strength to endure such suffering. He shrugged and said with a gentle smile, “I figure if a man can rise from the dead, anything is possible.”

David and Marie Works appeared on The 700 Club back in ’07 to talk about their grief as parents, and how their faith helped them bear the cross of their daughters being murdered by an anti-Christian maniac.

Heroes of the faith walk among us still. I met one this afternoon in Colorado Springs.

The hathos never quits:

Universities are nipping politically incorrect costumes in the bud this Halloween. Some have put up sensitivity flowcharts and flyers with the phone numbers of consultants students can call to make sure their costume doesn’t offend anyone.

“Unsure if your costume is offensive? Don’t be scared to ask questions,” a State University of New York at Geneseo poster reads, with the contact information of no less than five campus officials listed below.

If that wasn’t enough, Geneseo also provided a flowchart to show them the way of inclusive Halloween partying.

Look: